The Devil's Presence: A Novel

By James Oliver Goldsborough

Can fiction save us? Is there hope for America in the time of Trump, pandemics, QAnon, and the end of genuine political discourse? What better than this perfectly told novel to tell the story of so many of us to ourselves, as we seek hope and solace in terrible times.

Andy McKnight had never seen anything like it; nobody had. The election of this man was breaking up families across the nation – wives and husbands, children and parents, lifelong friends, the fabric of American social life torn apart as it hadn’t been since the Civil War. The venom even seeped into his own happy home. Then came the pandemic, two plagues at once – even in the Bible they were one at a time. He tried escaping into the past, back to better times, but Max and Elly, an old man and a young girl he met on the streets of Santa Monica, jolted him back to reality. With others like them – mad as hell and not going to take it anymore – maybe it wasn’t too late after all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: City Point Press
• Release date: May 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781947951679

James Oliver Goldsborough

James O. Goldsborough, raised in Los Angeles, is an award-winning writer with a 40-year career in journalism. Goldsborough spent 15 years in Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, International Herald Tribune, Newsweek Magazine and the Toronto Star. He has written numerous articles for the New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. His first book, “Rebel Europe,” published by Macmillan, was hailed by the Los Angeles Times reviewer, “the most important book I have read in years.” He next published The Misfortunes of Wealth a family memoir dealing with the disadvantages of inherited money. His earlier well-received historical novels are The Paris Herald (2014) and Waiting for Uncle John (2018), both published by Prospecta Press and Blood and Oranges (2021) published by City Point Press.

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The Devil’s Presence

a novel

James Oliver Goldsborough

For the denizens of Playa del Rey, those that are left.

Simple folk never sense the devil’s presence, not even when his hands are on their throats.

—Mephistopheles in Auerbach’s Leipzig wine-cellar:Goethe: Faust, Part 1

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved with it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

Part One

Chapter 1

They knew the Kuhio Road as well as they knew the streets at home and were already tired of it. They walked it every morning, knew its churches, tiki bars and surf shops. After a late breakfast, they went to the beach for reading and swimming. It was early spring, and the water was far warmer than it would be at home. They’d come to the islands to escape. At home things were bad, and the islands seemed far enough away that they could forget about it. But they couldn’t. At least he couldn’t, couldn’t get the misery out of his mind.

He watched her coming up from the bay, dripping, smiling, toweling off. They weren’t young anymore, but she still looked good. That had never been a problem.

If the water was like this at home, I’d swim every day, she said.

Probably twenty degrees difference in water temper-ature.

So why don’t we move here?

She was kidding. She would never leave her friends.

We don’t want to look for new doctors, he said.

Later, they walked back to the house they’d rented off Weke Road. The first thing he’d done after arrival was to unplug the television. He couldn’t keep her from using her devices, but she was getting better at leaving them off. Limit the bad news. That’s why they’d come. Recharge. Try for a new start.

He’d had a good swim out beyond the surf, close to a half-mile, he figured. He felt it. The frustrating thing about growing old is that you can be in as good shape as ever but the body knows the difference and likes reminding you. Too many dead cells. Stamina isn’t what it was. He’d been swimming every day since they arrived, managing by the third time out to put sharks out of his mind. There’d been an attack in the bay. A girl lost an arm. He’d been warned.

Home from the beach in mid-afternoon, he ate a few crackers, drank some pineapple juice and headed for the shower. Dried off, feeling good from the swim as always, he drew the curtains and stretched out on the bed to read a chapter in his Simenon novel and maybe fall asleep. The house had three bedrooms, but they only used two. Nancy would nap in her own room. She took a nap every day. He only napped when he needed to, which was more often than it used to be.

The first thing he’d wanted to know about the house was the bedrooms. There had to be at least two, and they—or at least his—had to have curtains, not sheers or blinds or shades, but real curtains. He needed dark to sleep, day or night, dark and quiet, always had. Nancy was the opposite, needed fresh air and didn’t mind light. The house on Weke looked north toward Hanalei Bay, but the bedrooms faced east. When the sun came up over the Princeville hills it shone bright into the bedrooms. The owners, a Japanese couple on the south side of the island who came to Hanalei only in summer, knew about the sun. They’d put in good curtains, thick and opaque. They’d sent photos.

That night they walked to Sam’s on Kuhio for grilled opa and drinks. Nancy had cooked when they first arrived, but gave it up when they discovered Sam’s. It was an island place like most with thatch and bamboo and nets with shells on the wall, but it had its pretensions. The food and coconut rum drinks were good and for dinner you had to have shoes and a shirt to get seated, which kept out the surfers. Masks were required, but you took them off when seated. Laid-back Kauai wasn’t Oahu, and rural Hanalei wasn’t Honolulu, not even Lihue. The fish at Sam’s was fresh, and the only music was an old Hawaiian who sat in a corner with his ukulele singing about the humuhumunukunukuapia’a that went swimming by. Turned out to be a triggerfish, said Sam, who was Japanese/American, advising him to stick with the opa. The waitresses wore print sarongs and looked good in them. Nancy said sarongs were good for women of a certain age.

How come we don’t eat this at home? he asked.

Not sure. I’ve never seen opa at the pier.

Must be a warm water fish.

We have swordfish.

He stirred some mint leaves in his Hawaiian mojito. Swordfish is good. Especially the way you do it.

I don’t want to set you off, she said after a moment, but the news from home is really awful.

I thought you were going to leave those things turned off.

You can’t remove yourself from the world.

So what awful news are you referring to?

The fires.

Ah, the fires.

We may not have a state to return to.

Our own fault.

She stared at him. What do you mean?

I mean too many people just don’t give a damn. We’ll be dead anyway, they say, so why worry about the planet? Let it burn.

She frowned and sipped her mojito. The pandemic is spreading. Millions will die, they say now. Worse than the Black Plague.

At least.

Trump says it’s fake, she said.

Millions dead is fake?

Riots in Portland, Chicago, Philadelphia and Louisville.

Louisville?

Police shot a woman in her apartment. Andy, I don’t get it. Okay, so we’re not all alike. That doesn’t mean we have to kill each other. They don’t do that in other countries.

Slavery, he said. Americans can’t get past it.

You think that’s what it is?

Trump legitimizes their hate.

Whose hate?

The supremacists.

She didn’t answer, and he fished for a mint leaf. You know, there was a time when all the bad news wasn’t about America. When I worked for the Paris paper sometimes the front page would have nothing from the States. Everything was crisis in Berlin or Cuba or China or the Middle East. Trouble in South Africa was big. Indonesia. We had Vietnam, but in Europe that wasn’t big news.

Front page news has to be bad, doesn’t it?

Mostly.

They walked home along dark and empty streets. Kuhio went to bed early in the time of the plagues.

The old question: Does how you feel determine how you see the news, or does the news determine how you feel? The idea that we’d passed the tipping point was upon him each day, his first conscious thought of the morning. It wasn’t always like that. He remembered days when he would awaken with zest for the new day. When the sun comes up the whole world dances with joy and everyone’s heart is filled with bliss, roshi Suzuki wrote somewhere. Not anymore. The idea of bliss and dancing with joy belonged to some other world.

He’d grown estranged from his friends and even from his wife, which is why they’d come to Hanalei. At home, they’d tried avoiding reality for months, but after a while it didn’t work anymore. At least, for him, it didn’t. The ship was heading for the rocks with an idiot at the helm, and he had to sound the alarm. His friends eventually stopped listening. They were sick of him but too civilized to argue all the time. So they dropped him.

It was hard on Nancy. She still played tennis and had her bridge group and backyard parties. Only now she went without him. The Trump venom had leaked into his own marriage. That’s when he thought of the islands, of getting away, try a little escape. Maybe the planet was dying, viruses running rampant and government run by liars and grifters, but you still had your life to live. Her friends called him paranoid and told her not to listen to his rants. Some were going to vote for Trump, she told him; it’s their right. That’s when he first suspected. No, he said, it’s nobody’s right to support the devil. He couldn’t sit at a table, even stay in the room with those people. They were the enablers, the comforters, the amen chorus. The thought that voters would return to power in November the perpetrators of their own destruction was too much for him. But Nancy?

He’d brought her to Kauai years before on their honeymoon so why not try again? Maybe Hanalei was part of the dying world, but it didn’t seem to be. Tucked away on the empty north coast of a small island lost in the middle of a great ocean, cooled by winds from the west, it seemed immune. He would turn off the news, exorcise fire, disease, death, and the devil from his consciousness and start breathing again. Nancy, too.

It didn’t work. Ten days away, and she wanted to get back to her routines. They found it hard to talk and just as hard to stay silent. Their minds had entered different orbits.

Incompatibility? After thirty-five years marriage? But they’d always been compatible. That’s why they married. They’d both reached age forty with full lives and no intention of giving up independence. Then they met and decided to give it up. Nancy had always had men around her, but never one she wanted to marry. That’s what she told him. For him—except for the French girl he’d married and the English girl who came between them—it was the same.

He’d met Nancy in the lingerie department of Robinson’s in Beverly Hills. She helped him find the negligee he wanted, and he couldn’t stop thinking how it would look on her. She wrote her name on the sales receipt, and when he brought it back she didn’t seem surprised.

The wrong size? She didn’t like it? But it’s so pretty.

I gave her something else.

They started dating soon afterward. When they married six months later in the Lutheran Church on Wilshire most of the guests were her friends. He was working at the Times in those days and invited a few friends, mostly from the newspaper. Her friends were from everywhere, some from Robinson’s, some from church, some from when she’d arrived in the city from Milwaukee twenty years earlier and even a few from back home. She was a popular and attractive girl, as much with men as with women. There’d been some men who wanted to marry her, but she wasn’t ready. Some of them, she confessed, were already married. One of her friends said she was attracted to married men precisely because they weren’t available. She saw the truth in it. You had to be available in case something better came along. For some reason she regarded Andy McKnight as something better. Maybe he was in those days.

Nancy Neefe had come to town in the sixties with a girlfriend, both of them dropping out of a Wisconsin community college. They were good German girls from good Lutheran farm families—Nancy’s family claimed a distant relationship to Christian Gottlob Neefe, Beethoven’s first music teacher, though no one in her Wisconsin family was musical. Nancy was the first in the family to leave the farm, but she had more on her mind than becoming a farmer’s wife. Too much work, too many children, too little hope. She had no Hollywood aspirations, but had seen brochures on Southern California, so that’s where they headed. She found a sales job at Robinson’s, an apartment with her friend in Santa Monica and only returned to the farm for weddings and funerals.

The trip home from Kauai was gloomy. He’d plugged in the television the last day to see what he’d missed. Trump was doubling down as elections approached, tormenting the nation as long as he could. What strange psychosis causes a man to regard the earth and humanity as enemies? What strange psychoticism infects a nation that elects such a creature? The fires still raged, the temperatures still climbed, the plague still spread, businesses still shut down, Trump still lied and denied and insulted. No country wanted anything to do with the United States anymore. Trump banned Europeans, and Europeans banned Americans. We were isolated. Kim and Putin, the dictators, were our friends now. Kim and Putin, bloodthirsty Stalinists longing for the good old days. Trump thought he could do business with them. What kind of fool was he?

The flight was smooth, passengers masked and scattered. Honolulu airport was almost empty; few flights to the islands these days. She kept on her earphones, he read his novel. He’d almost bought a New York Times when they changed planes from Lihue but didn’t want any more bad news. He wasn’t sure how much worse things could get, but anything was possible with a bomb-thrower. He thought of the New Yorker cartoon he’d put on the refrigerator four years before. A man in bed tells his bedmate, who is setting the alarm, wake me in 2020.

The alarm was ringing.

LAX was bad, the airport a massive construction zone as the city tried to undo the self-inflicted damage of a few decades before when it pulled up eleven hundred miles of rails and trolleys—called by some the world’s best urban transit system—to replace them with cars, highways, and carbon dioxide. At the cost of countless billions, it was now rebuilding the trolley system in an attempt to get rid of cars, highways, and carbon dioxide. He’d edited a story for the Times about that, the author pointing out that the new system would precisely follow the lines of the old system, a demonstration, said the writer, that the human race was not getting smarter, as evolutionists once predicted.

Smoke from fires in the mountains was as strong as when they’d left. It took a half hour to find a taxi and another twenty minutes to get out of the airport. He told the driver to skip the freeway and take Lincoln Boulevard. They lived on 22nd Street in Santa Monica, a street far west of the freeway so no use getting stuck in freeway traffic. They’d just started the freeway system when he was at UCLA, and he remembered the transportation professor explaining that it would never work. Freeways would simply attract more drivers until they were as slow as the surface streets. What then?

Turning off Lincoln a half hour later, he saw people wearing masks along Wilshire. Nancy had bought masks in a shop on Kuhio, hand-made by native Hawaiians, they said. The driver turned again onto 22nd, a few more leafy blocks to go. They passed the former house of Jack Ferraro, one person he’d always looked forward to seeing. For Sale was still up on the lawn. The Ferraros had moved to New Zealand to escape fires, smoke, and the plagues. Escape America. It was a slow real estate market, and their house hadn’t yet sold. Retired people needed $1 million each to emigrate to New Zealand to cover the costs of the health care system, which was free. Jack had saved a million and borrowed the rest against his house.

Buck up, he told himself as they approached their house; nobody who lives on a street like this in a town like this has a right to complain. Think of the people who don’t have something like this to return to, who don’t have anything to return to. Think of the people who have been burnt out, lost their loved ones, their jobs, their business, their hopes, their dreams, their lives. He tried that line of thought the rest of the way home. It didn’t stick.

Chapter 2

He hadn’t checked his messages in a month and was in no hurry to do so. There’d been a time when he checked constantly, afraid of missing something. The life of a newspaperman. Lately, he didn’t care what he missed, since all the news was bad. Opening the suitcases while Nancy drove to the market on Montana, he decided email could wait another day. He could have checked it on Kauai, but liked the idea of going to ground. If people needed to reach him (unlikely, he knew), his messages would have gone through Nancy’s account. There was also the possibility that he would have no messages, another reason not to check. If he’d had any reason to expect good news, he’d have gone straight to the computer.

Needing exercise to restore him, he changed into shorts and a T-shirt and set out up Carlyle toward the country club, a familiar route. In the old days, he might have dropped in for a friendly cocktail with the boys at the bar, but he didn’t go to the club anymore, didn’t even know if the bar was open during the plague. They’d joined soon after they married when initiation fees were still four figures, not six. Nancy played tennis and joined the bridge group. He’d done some swimming and played tennis, but was still at the Times in those days and didn’t have much free time. He discovered he didn’t like club people, whose principal interest was golf and their portfolios. For swimming, he preferred the ocean anyway.

He’d made the walk along Carlyle, up to 25th, around to Georgina and home again hundreds of times, but never tired of it. He liked his neighborhood, and a good half-hour on the streets generally pulled him out of whatever sour mood had gotten into him. Carlyle was good for walking, sheltered in thick pines instead of the palms on most Santa Monica streets, easier to breathe, maybe because evergreens absorbed more smoke from the fires in the foothills. The street lighting was just right, tall dewdrop lampposts hidden by taller trees that did not give off too much light. He liked the dark.

Nancy was home when he got back, and they made ham and cheese sandwiches for dinner. She made a salad. He opened a bottle of pinot noir from the days before Napa burnt down. He could see she was happy to be home.

You check your messages? she asked.

Tomorrow.

Phone?

Mostly robocalls.

Our surface mail should resume tomorrow.

You have anything planned?

Call around, see what the girls are doing. How about you?

Might drive down to the beach.

Twenty degrees difference, that what you said?

I may not last a half mile.

No sharks, though.

He laughed.

It’s good to see you laugh.

He sipped his wine. I can’t find much to laugh about.

You have to try harder.

After breakfast the following day, with Nancy off to the club to see what she’d missed, he went into his den, shut the door, and turned on the computer. He’d shut it down and had to log on, looking up the password he could